Water in Latin America: The Importance of Gender Relations

Water in Latin America: The Importance of Gender Relations

by

Nidya Sarria

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), private corporations,
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have explored possible
solutions to the worldwide water crisis in the past. Consequently,
water policy has been shaped by debate, discussion, and field work
alike. As these players refine their arguments and sharpen
policy, their focus will shift to reflect the realities of the
contemporary world. Among these shifts is a realignment of policy to
reflect the perspective of the world's competition for water as a
finite resource, especially for disadvantaged minorities and women.

As caretakers and homemakers, women are usually responsible for
finding water according to its accessibility, availability, quality,
and use. Despite their prominent role in the use and management of
water, women are generally not consulted on matters of water
infrastructure or policy, even though United Nations researchers
suggest that the perspectives of women need to be taken into account
when building wells and bettering access to cleaner water. This
oversight is a blow to gender empowerment around the globe, as women
remain economically subservient to their male counterparts and without
formal rights to a vital resource. Recognizing the importance of women
in relation to water can elevate the status of women while providing
all members of society with an essential resource.

Gender Inequality in the Community

Though water has long been considered a basic need, and defined by the
United Nations as a basic right in 2002, 1.1 billion people globally
remain without access to potable water. In fact, only half of the world
population has access to piped water. Moreover, an astonishing 2.6
billion people across the globe remain without sanitation services,
even though the World Health Organization states that "water and
sanitation are among the most important determinants of public health."

Women, especially minority women, suffer disproportionately due to
their lack of access to clean water, even in comparison to other
members of the community. In developing regions of the world, as much
as a quarter of a woman's productive time is spent collecting water for
her family. This time represents a staggering constraint on the ability
of women to generate income. A close examination of life in Nicaragua,
for instance, exposes the deep-rooted social norms that govern the
lives of women and other disadvantaged members of society, impeding not
only their acquisition and use of clean water in the absence of male
family members, but also their power in their community.

Life in Nicaragua is rife with hardships for women, especially among
the lower classes. The 15 major rivers in the Pacific region of
Nicaragua are contaminated as a result of the agricultural development.
Pesticides, fertilizers, and industrial waste from food processing,
chicken farms, cattle slaughtering, tanneries, as well as mining and
oil refineries have made water supplies unsafe to drink. Saline
intrusion and high concentrations of nitrates and sulfides also play a
part in the poor quality of water in Nicaragua.

This scarcity of clean water creates vast complications for
Nicaraguans; although 93 percent of Nicaraguans in urban areas have
legal or illegal access to water, only a handful of cities have sewage
systems. To illustrate, the capital city of Managua is not equipped
with a sewage system and only 34 percent of the urban population has
sewage coverage. Household water management in poor urban neighborhoods
and low-income rural areas is an incredibly difficult, intensive,
physically demanding, and stressful daily necessity.

As in most developing nations, women in Nicaragua are responsible
for most tasks involving water, including cooking, cleaning, laundry,
and caring for the sick, elderly and children. Female residents of
poor, urban neighborhoods obtain water for their families from
community faucets that may function for only a few hours a day and
service from one to two hundred families in the city. Consequently,
women become responsible for rationing water in the case of a drought
or water shortage. Some women might also obtain water from trucks that
deliver once or twice a week. These women carry multiple pails of water
home every day, usually with only the help of their children. Many
women also have income-generating jobs, either maintaining home
businesses or working low-paying factory jobs that produce goods for
first-world consumers, further complicating their ability to provide
their family with clean water. Likewise, women in rural areas face
harsher conditions. Approximately 72 percent of residents in those
areas do not have regular access to clean water, and typically obtain
water from community wells, irrigation ditches, or nearby rivers,
lakes, and streams, often becoming exposed to disease from pollutants.

Clearly, disparities between genders can be found in most regions of
the developing world. Nevertheless, though women face overwhelming
odds, they have still sought increasing rights both in policy
negotiations and local decision-making. IGOs, private corporations, and
NGOs are working together with national governments to secure access to
clean water in the developing world. Women frequently voice their
concerns at the grassroots level and attempt to play a crucial role as
representatives of their communities.

Women as Representatives of Local Development

Any finite resource will be a source of contention among the various
groups that compete to obtain it. Nevertheless, water resource
management has traditionally suffered from an uncoordinated approach
for allocating water between competing groups. The inequitable
distribution of the benefits and burdens of water resources as well as
the inadequate involvement of both women and men in its conservation
has resulted in across-the-board environmental degradation. Moreover,
community management approaches are unable to address these issues
because communities are seen as a group of people with a common purpose
when a community is actually "made up of individuals and groups who
command different levels of power, wealth, influence and ability to
express their needs, concerns and rights." Unequal relationships
between men and women often place women, especially if they are poor,
in a position of palpable disadvantage.

Nowhere is this unequal relationship more evident than in the lack
of formal involvement of women in water-related development projects
and other formal water organizations. Men comprise the majority of
members in irrigators' associations as a result of the ties between
membership and titles to land and water. Women are underrepresented in
these associations, limiting their ability to provide input in
decisions concerning the allocation of water resources. Barred from
membership, women have no opportunity to become leaders in these
organizations, which play an important role in their local communities.

As it is, when women participate in irrigation associations,
cultural norms prevent their voices from being heard. For example, men
and women participated in almost equal numbers in one small-scale
irrigation project in Ecuador. Nevertheless, on average, men spoke for
twenty-eight minutes while women spoke for three and a half minutes.
When pressed to provide an explanation, women said that they were
reluctant to voice their concerns for fear of ridicule. In a similar
meeting in Mexico, women sat in the back of the room and attempted to
avoid notice.

This lack of active participation by women in water organizations,
reinforced by cultural norms that typically do not allow women
membership or leadership, is deeply problematic. Women and men tend to
have different priorities and perspectives. Water management and policy
that does not take women's viewpoints into consideration nearly always
becomes ineffective. In Ecuador, when community water project leaders
asked men and women about their water priorities, men favored a
rotational system in which they could irrigate for a shorter period
with a heavier flow of water. Women, on the other hand, wanted water
daily, in order to wash clothes and bathe children, as well as to use
as drinking water. They expressed interest in building canals to bring
water closer to their homes in addition to using water for irrigation
purposes. Given the nature of most organizations, the plan with the
most vocal support would be implemented, despite its inefficiency.
Without the ability to argue for the plan that best suits their needs,
women and their families remain at a disadvantage.

Moreover, though irrigation is seen as a male occupation, in the
absence of men, many women are being forced to manage the land and
provide for their family. In male-dominated communities, this can be a
difficult matter. Nevertheless, while some female farmers may have
access to water despite their lack of formal rights, it is important
that women be recognized in the community as both irrigators and
managers of water. In practice, the distribution of water to
agricultural fields differs from official schedules leading most
communities to exert a high degree of social control over water. Women
who are not recognized as official managers of water are often left out
of decision-making and barred from access to information that is
typically accessible only to men who are able to maintain friendly
relationships with canal operators and irrigation agency personnel.
Gender differences in social relations discourage women from
establishing friendships with men outside of their immediate families.
Higher class male farmers are often in the position to "bluff their
way" into demanding more water when convenient, while single women have
no such social power.

Though this has been discussed and even acknowledged by the crafters
of water policy in the past, little concrete action to rectify the
problem has been taken by those IGOs, corporations, and NGOs that work
with the water sector in the developing world. Although this mindset
prevails throughout the water sector, a close examination of the
history of water policy concludes that there have been gains among
women over the last few decades. Further work on gender empowerment in
development can build upon these past gains.

Progress of Water Policy

The early focus in the field of development was on supporting
centralized, government-run public sector efforts. Water development
was carried out by male engineers following blueprints laid out by
advisers from wealthier nations while women were rarely consulted and,
in fact, were often unable to participate in development as a career
due to gender roles. On the whole, women in the developing world
received even less recognition than in the case of their first-world
counterparts.

The role of women as the managers of domestic water was formally
recognized by the development sector in the 1970s and 1980s, as
researchers came to the conclusion that women were the managers of
domestic water in the developing world and thus, a vital constituency
in water development. The involvement of women in water development and
management was promoted for economic reasons. Female participation was
expected to increase the efficiency of water projects due to their
stake in the outcome. Women were trained as caretakers, educators,
motivators, and hand-pump mechanics. Nevertheless, the costs,
constraints and other barriers to women's involvement in development
were never seriously discussed. Though this was the first time women
were acknowledged for their potential contributions to development,
recognition alone does not constitute actual solutions.

During the 1990s, a number of different trends in development
emerged, leading to an ambiguous overall policy on water. The role of
the state in public provision was rejected on the basis of having been
costly and inefficient. Instead, the market was expected to provide
basic services while the government merely enabled and regulated the
private sector. Predictably, this led to a worldwide movement toward
privatization, decentralization, and demand management. The global
commitment to "water for all" made gender empowerment so crucial that
in 1999, over 100 nations endorsed the Dublin principles. These basic
rules affirmed water not only as an "economic good," but also as finite
and essential to life. They put priority on privatization, water
pricing, and cost recovery. Both the Dublin principles and the
Environmental Summit in Rio reinforced the role of women as central to
the provision, management, and safeguarding of water. But again, the
gap between these economic goals and the challenges of water
distribution as it relates to gender inequality was not widely
discussed.

Recently, the focus has been on the role of water in women's
empowerment and poverty reduction. The World Water Council hopes that
almost everyone will have access to safe and adequate water and
sanitation by 2025. As it stands, most policies do not reflect field
evidence, which has established that women are the de facto
managers of water in local communities. Most formal evaluations of
water development have been superficial due to a lack of analysis on
the impact of water projects and pricing policies on social relations.
There is little follow-up on past water development projects, and thus
it remains unclear which approaches in the past have brought about
positive change for women. This lack of research and follow-up can be
remedied among other ways by the increased utilization of gender
approaches to water development, both by male and female development
workers.

In order to address gender in development, practitioners have
developed frameworks for understanding women's roles and interests, as
well as methods for analyzing hierarchies of female participation.
However, by mainstreaming gender issues, gender began to be viewed as a
technical problem to be overcome at the risk of oversimplification and
a distortion of the issues. Most organizations and institutions working
to put gender issues at the forefront of the field remained internally
insensitive to gender, though it is known that a gendered approach in
the water sector is cost effective and creates positive impacts in the
field.

Keeping this in mind, in the past, the United Nations has developed
an Interagency Task Force on Gender and Water. This initiative is
charged with facilitating gender mainstreaming in water-related United
Nations policies and planning. In efforts to meet the Millennium
Development Goals on water and sanitation, the Task Force promotes the
integration of a "gender perspective" in actions for the "Water for
Life" Decade, in the World Water Assessment Programme and the World
Water Development Report and in the Human Development Report focusing
on water resources. Certainly, the Interagency Task Force on Gender and
Water is a step in the right direction.

Recommendations and Conclusion

Current and past water policy has had limited results. The United
Nations has agreed that water is an economic, social, and environmental
good that should be equally distributed to both men and women. Water
supply services and infrastructure are economic activities; women's
lack of rights to land and water, as well as on development efforts,
often negatively affect their livelihoods. However, though women are
defined as essential providers and users of water, the social and
cultural roles of women remains poorly analyzed while their ability to
pay for water is often assumed but seldom validated.

Though the international water sector, which includes such bodies as
the World Bank, the Global Water Partnership and the World Water Forum,
endorse privatization, this goes against the idea that water is an
intrinsic right. When access to water is limited to only those with the
ability to pay, women inevitably suffer the consequences. The World
Bank Watch even claims that "such policies reduce access, raise the
price of water for the poor, exacerbate inequalities, and reduce local
control." Access to a basic water supply is a fundamental human right.
Both men and women should help determine the rates of payment. In many
cases, women do not have control over money, but water usage is often
considered their responsibility. Increased prices for water should not
apply when meeting basic human needs, including minimum water
consumption for cooking and hygiene.

Moreover, there has been little to no action on women's rights to
water within the context of their limited rights at home and in their
communities. By educating women, nations can promote the health of the
general population, as well as achieve smaller family sizes as a result
of family planning. In fact, the education of women may be the single
best lever for obtaining substantial reductions in fertility. Smaller
families and a stable population growth can be a crucial factor in
allowing nations to more adequately distribute their natural resources,
including water, among their people. Educated women, too, can help
shatter social norms and gender roles, using their education to become
leaders in their communities, including in roles related to water
policy.

Likewise, development organizations must get past the lip service
they currently provide to gender empowerment issues and take a more
proactive stance. These organizations must make it a priority to speak
to women in the community and take their needs into consideration in
addition to those needs expressed by men. For instance, irrigation
system planners almost never make the connection between agriculture
and the domestic use of water. In many cases, irrigation systems can be
designed to provide water for both uses, leading to untold benefits for
both men and women, as well as their families. Development
organizations, too, must put pressure on local irrigation officials to
follow official plans of operations that take both men and women into
consideration. They must also take gender empowerment a step further
and encourage women to take leadership roles in their local
communities. Moreover, development organizations must strive for
diversity within their own organization by developing gender awareness
programs and public relations techniques for the purpose of better
understanding women's perceptions and needs.

Further

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